Weapons found include US-made TOW missiles, American artillery and M16s, all of which would be difficult to procure in mass quantities unless the US was directly sending munitions to the Middle East.

“The Syrian Army has repeatedly found boxes containing weapons that read ‘US Property,’ hence statements suggesting these were Chinese copies are probably incorrect,” reported Sputnik. “In addition, Daesh terrorists have also used Heckler & Koch’s MP5 submachine gun, popular with US and European law enforcement agencies.”

Other equipment used by ISIS included gear manufactured to Israeli and NATO specifications as well as a cache of Glock 19s originally sent to Iraqi security forces starting in 2003.

The discovery of US-manufactured TOW missiles is not surprising; in late 2015, ISIS released a video showing its militants use a US TOW missile to shoot down a Russian helicopter:

Earlier that year, the Obama administration worked with Turkey to train and arm so-called “Syrian rebels,” yet by then there were very few – if any – rebel groups independent of ISIS left in Syria.

Since 2013, ISIS has grown into the dominant power fighting the Syrian government after continuously absorbing smaller sects of rebels who couldn’t compete in munitions and manpower, according to Middle Eastern media.

“We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” said a Free Syrian Army commander, Abu Khaled, when asked why his unit was fighting alongside ISIS.

Another commander made a similar statement.

“We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in… Qalamoun [in Syria],” Bassel Idriss, the commander of a Free Syrian Army rebel brigade, told the Lebanese Daily Star in 2014. “ISIS wanted to enhance its presence in the Western Qalamoun area.”

“After the fall of Yabroud and the FSA’s retreat into the hills, many units pledged allegiance to ISIS.”

Even the left-leaning Huffington Post reported that ISIS had “taken advantage of a power vacuum in rebel-held areas to assert its authority over more moderate elements of the armed opposition.”

In 2012, Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. started backing al-Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into ISIS, and other Islamic extremist groups as a proxy army to topple Syrian President Bashir al-Assad, an Alawite Muslim who was at odds with Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

“The Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” a leaked memo between her State Dept. and the Pentagon stated. “The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support [this] opposition, while Russia, China and Iran ‘support the [Assad] regime.’”

ISIS also released another video showing American-made weapons airdropped into territory it controlled in 2014, which collaborates with the leaked memo:

The memo likely stemmed from a discussion during the 2012 Bilderberg conference in which participants envisioned a Syrian puppet government taking orders from the U.S. State Department, the European Union and NATO.

Syria also rivals Turkey as one of the most strategic locations for natural gas pipelines to flow into Europe from Asia.

“Syria is the site of the proposed construction of a massive underground gas pipeline that, if completed, could drastically undercut the strategic energy power of U.S. ally Qatar and also would cut Turkey out of the pipeline flow,” Aaron Klein of WND reported. “Dubbed the ‘Islamic pipeline,’ the project may ultimately favor Russia and Iran against Western energy interests.”